Tuesday, December 27, 2011

"Japan's Secret Plan to Dominate the World"

Just as one of my mentors used to watch loading docks to spot accounting frauds and the IRS checks water bills to detect tax non-compliance at laundromats, electricity output is one of those simple, basic things that tell a truth that some might prefer to keep hidden.
From Mother Jones:

And now for something completely different. The Counterparties blog today highlights an old post from Eamonn Fingleton arguing that Japan's "Lost Decade" is a myth. This is not the story I've heard before, suggesting merely that Japan has done pretty well considering its demographic problems. Not at all. This story suggests that Japan is just flat out lying about its economic growth. For example, here's a piece of data from Fingleton's blog:

In 2007 it was discovered that the long-term record in electricity output completely gainsaid the “lost decades” story. Adjusted to a per-capita basis, the figures showed that Japan’s electricity output in the 1990s rose 2.7 times faster than America’s!....Electricity output is widely accepted as an impartial, culture-neutral proxy for economic growth and it is indeed relied on by international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank when a government may not be following international accounting standards in calculating GDP growth.

For those who know Japanese history, a clue lies in trade policy. The fact is that, constantly since the 1870s (with the exception of a brief interlude in the late 1930s and early 1940s), Japan's pre-eminent policy objective has been to keep ramping up exports. That policy came very close to derailment in the late 1980s as a groundswell of opposition built up in the West. By the early 1990s, however, the opposition had largely evaporated as news of the crash led Western policymakers to pity rather than fear the "humbled juggernaut." It is a short jump from this to the conclusion that Japanese officials have decided to put a negative spin on much of the economic news ever since.

What is undeniable is that just as corporate executives enjoy great latitude to juggle their profits up or down for different disclosure purposes (generally up for shareholders, and almost invariably down for the Internal Revenue Service), government officials enjoy even greater latitude to vary a nation's ostensible growth rate....MORE